This week we’re considering ‘Could you forgive the unforgivable?’ Life can bring us great challenges, place us in seemingly unbearable situations, darkness may come and seem to obscure all light.…Read More

Cinequest Director of Programming Michael Rabehl, and Award winning director Jeremy Guy, give insight into Cinequest from two different perspectives: one from the creative organisational side and the other from…Read More

(10:35) Fifteen-thousand healthcare workers in California ratified a new, five-year contract with Dignity Health. The new contact was created in an effort to help protect jobs and patient care, as…Read More

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Saturday Food Chain

Every Saturday morning, from 9 to 10 a.m, join KSCO's Michael Olson for a discussion on local farm and agriculture issues.

Michael Olson produced, wrote and/or photographed feature-length news for a variety of media, including the San Francisco Chronicle and Examiner newspapers, Skiing and Small Space Gardening magazines,NBC, ABC, Australian Broadcast Commission, and KQED Public Television networks. His production and photography helped win a National Emmy nomination for NBC Magazine with David Brinkley. Olson is the author of MetroFarm, the Ben Franklin Book of the Year Finalist and Executive Producer and Host of the syndicated Saturday Food Chain radiotalk show, which received the Ag/News Show of the Year Award from the California Legislature. He recently authored Tales from a Tin Can, which is the oral-history of a World War II US Navy destroyer that earned a Starred Review from Publishers Weekly.

Business Person

Olson designed, blended and packaged a fertilizer for container-grown house and garden plants; certified and registered the product as a “specialty fertilizer” with the State of California; and sold the product to the national lawn and garden market. Olson has over two decades of broadcast media management and, as General Manager of newstalk radio stations KSCO & KOMY in Santa Cruz, California, has helped hundreds of locally-owned businesses compete against national chains. Olson is currently a partner in the MO MultiMedia Group of Santa Cruz, California.

Cocaine + Caffeine= Coca Cola - Guest: Mark Pendergrast, Author of "The Definitive History of the Great American Soft Drink and the Company that Makes It"

Mark Pendergrast joins Michael Olson to discuss the history of the iconic American soft drink. Learn about the trials and errors of one of America's biggest companies. To find out more about Mark and his book click here: http://markpendergrast.com/coca-cola

I recently sat in on a Food Dialogues panel discussion titled “The Straight Story on Biotech in Agriculture: The Media and its Impact on Consumers.”

http://www.fooddialogues.com/chicago-food-dialogues/bio-conference

******This discussion, which took place in Chicago at the International Bio convention in front of an audience of biotech people from biotech companies like Monsanto and DuPont, quickly became a tug of words between organic and conventional agriculture. One of the panelists, Dr. Bob Goldberg, was the author of the ballot argument against California’s Proposition 37 GMO Labeling initiative, and so had lots of words with which to tug, and was very good at tugging.

*******Nevertheless, I was there to tell the audience why I think people are uncertain about their technologies, and the foods those technologies produce, and so offered up something like this:…“You have at your hands a marvelous new technology which has the capacity for ultimate good, and ultimate bad. You have made it possible for one farmer to grow thousands of acres of food crops with no weeds, and therefore have made their lives much better, and yourselves, much wealthier. But what did consumers get? They got food drenched in herbicide and infused with pesticide. And some of those consumers are starting to ask, ‘What’s to eat?’” … Those who manufacture herbicide-resistant plants say that the herbicide saturated foods are safe for people and mammals to eat. The herbicides go right straight through us, they say, and they have the science to back up what they say. And who am I to doubt the wisdom of their science?…Then I ran across the following in the journal Entropy: “… glyphosate is the “textbook example of exogenous semiotic entropy.” And… “Consequences are most of the diseases and conditions associated with a Western diet, which include gastrointestinal disorders, obesity, diabetes, heart disease, depression, autism, infertility, cancer, and Alzheimer’s disease.”… This leads us to ask the author of that Entropy article……Is the herbicide glyphosate (Roundup) safe to eat?

••••Is seaweed a good food for the human body?*I was introduced to the nutritional properties of seaweed by Robin, a dedicated gardener from South Africa. “I have a few boxes to take to the flea market,” he said, “May I have a lift?”******When I saw that the boxes contained kelp Robin had drug home from the nearby beach and shredded by hand, I said, “Robin, you have got to be kidding me! Who in their right mind is going to buy that seaweed?”

*******“Oh,” Robin replied, “You’ll see!” …After running a few errands, I decided to swing by the flea market to see how Robin was doing peddling his boxes of seaweed. I found him standing there with a confused look. There were no boxes of seaweed to be seen anywhere. … “Robin,” I said, “Did you really sell those boxes of seaweed? “ … “No,” he replied, slowly and sadly swinging his head from side to side. “I went to the restroom and when I came back the boxes were gone. Somebody just took them!” •••The theft of Robin’s boxes caused me to wonder about the value of the seaweed, and later, to buy tons of it to manufacture an organic fertilizer called Soil Essence. It would be fair to say that I became a believer in the nutritional properties of kelp. •••That being said, the following claim gives me cause to pause: “The people that eat it (kelp) every day or maybe even three times a week, are the healthiest and longest living people in the history of mankind.”•••This claim leads me to ask… ••••Is seaweed a good food for the human body?

When possible, the United States sends the surplus crops of its farmers to feed the world’s hungry.******The Obama administration is planning to change this traditional way of aiding the world’s hungry: Instead of sending the surplus crops of its farmers, the administration wants to send the surplus money of its taxpayers.

*******The reason put forth for this change of plans is simple: Sending surplus U.S. crops to the hungry destroys the market for local agriculture. After all, the reasoning goes, local farmers cannot compete with free crops from abroad, and when local agriculture is destroyed, the hungry become even hungrier. … But others say sending surplus U.S. taxpayer money to foreign farmers will undermine the competitiveness of U.S. farmers and related industries. After all, the reasoning goes, what U.S. farmer can compete with foreign farmers receiving free U.S. taxpayer money? •••This disagreement over how the U.S. should administer its food aid leads us to ask… ••••Should we send food or money?

Michael Olson hosts Diana Reeves, GMO Free USA••••Why boycott Kellogg’s for selling GMO cereals?Having spent nearly $800,000 to defeat California’s GMO labeling initiative, Kellogg’s has positioned itself firmly in opposition to those who want to know about the GMOs in breakfast cereals.******When I asked Kellogg’s to join me on the Food Chain Radio show to discuss the GMO Free USA-led boycott of their breakfast cereals, spokesperson Kris Charles suggested, in a friendly sort of way, that everyone should just “go eat Kashi.”

*******What Kellogg’s was saying, in effect, was that it provides the marketplace with a line of cereals that are organic and Non-GMO Project Verified, and if that is what consumers want, that is what they can get with Kellogg’s cereals. … Today, the soothing properties of cannabis are claimed to be medicinal, and people now demand from the powers-that-be the right to grow and consume their own medicine. Their demand leads us to ask… ••••Why boycott Kellogg’s for selling GMO cereals?

Listen to Herodotus talk about the Scythians in 500 BC, as they gather around the campfire, throw marijuana seeds on the fire, and then…******“sit around in a circle; and by inhaling the fruit that has been thrown on, they become intoxicated by the odor, just as the Greeks do by wine; and the more fruit is thrown on, the more intoxicated they become, until they rise up and dance and betake themselves to singing.”

*******For as long as we can look back, which is around 10,000 years, we can see that people have used cannabis as a means to soothe their way through life. … Of course, people also used cannabis to make clothes for their bodies, paper for their books, sails for their ships, oil for their cooking, and rope to hold themselves together, to name but a few. Because it was so useful, cannabis became a principal crop of mankind, with tens of thousands of acres being grown around the world. Cannabis was so plentiful, in fact, one could harvest hundreds of pounds free from the roadside ditches of America’s heartland.

… However, in the 1930’s the soothing properties of cannabis came to the attention of powers-that-be, and they threw the cloak of prohibition over cannabis. This prohibition, ironically, ended the cultivation of cannabis for all purposes but that for which it was prohibited, and thus increased its value to thousands of dollars per pound. …

Today, the soothing properties of cannabis are claimed to be medicinal, and people now demand from the powers-that-be the right to grow and consume their own medicine. Their demand leads us to ask… ••••Should we be allowed to grow our own medicine?

“Dad! Why does the sign say, ‘Don’t feed the bears!”******“Because, son, Yellowstone Park does not want us to feed bears.”

*******“But Dad, the bears are hungry, and we have extra food. It doesn’t seem fair!” … Living in rural Yachats, Oregon, Karen Noyes did not have to abide by the rules of Yellowstone Park, and liked feeding the wild bears, and so fed them. And when she did, more bears came to be fed. Soon Karen Noyes had a yard full of bears to be fed, with more coming all the time.••••It did not take long before things got out of Karen Noyes’ hands. One of her bear friends stormed a neighbor’s turkey farm and killed 60 of its resident turkeys. Another bear friend took a liking to the neighbor lady and got stuck trying to sneak in through the lady’s dog door for visit. And so on …••••Consequent to all the bearishness going on in the neighborhood, poor Karen Noyes was arrested and convicted for “Harassing Wildlife.” She was then sentenced to three years of probation, which included an order not to go near her rural home.

*******Yellowstone Park has a long and storied history of wild bears and civilized people. When civilized people see the wild bears’ pleading looks of “feed me, feed me,” they often want to feed the wild bears. When they do, the wild bears often undergo a personality change, and the pleading looks become demanding looks that say, “FEED ME! FEED ME!”